Product Description

At heart, commercial awareness is a mindset: an attitude to life, to people, and to business. This book will help you develop that mindset.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #25958 in Books
• Published on: 2006-11
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback

From the Publisher
These days, it isn't enough to be technically competent at your job. You need to be commercially aware as well.



This book helps you develop this skill. It helps you relate to people you meet in business. It helps you understand their organisations in terms of structure, strategy and the big issues they face. And it helps you understand the role of money in business - how companies use it to expand and keep score, and how they tap the financial markets.



Whether you are just starting out on your professional career or have reached a point where you need to start relating to your organisation's clients, this book will help give you the edge.

Pithy, concise and written in plain English, this book will make for satisfied clients and a deeply rewarding career.

This new edition includes new chapters on selling, marketing and negogiating, as well as an updated finance section that tells you all you need to know about the credit crunch and financial crisis.

From the Author
If you want to be a successful professional, you need to have
commercial awareness. It wasn't always so. When I started out (as a young
lawyer) it was enough to know the law and how it affected corporate
clients. After all, the law was the difficult bit.

But that isn't good enough any more.

If you want to be an accountant, actuary, architect, advertising executive,
banker, barrister, broker, engineer, fund manager, headhunter, HR
professional, ITC specialist, legal executive, management consultant,
marketing adviser, patent attorney, property surveyor, PR expert, quantity
surveyor, recruitment consultant, solicitor, tax adviser - whatever it may
be - you need to master your own discipline and, on top of that, you need
to be commercially aware.

And the sooner you start doing that, the better. It's crucial to becoming a
successful professional. This book helps you achieve it.

From the Back Cover
Ask any head of graduate recruitment or HR or training what they
want from their young hires and they all say the same thing: 'commercial
awareness'.

They want people who are not just technically competent but who are
interested in business, who can relate to clients and - above all - who can
contextualise their advice.

The book is designed to help young professionals relate to their clients,
as organisations and people. It examines how business works and then it
looks at clients as individuals and how you can best relate to them.

Pithy, concise and written in plain English, this book will make for
satisfied clients and a deeply rewarding career.

Customer Reviews

Brilliant
I am a non-law undergraduate considering a career as a solicitor. I saw this book mentioned on one or two law training websites and decided to have a look. Having now read most of it, I cannot overemphasise just how good this is. I was previously slightly hesitant about becoming a lawyer as I was unsure about many aspects of business, but this has helped me so much. I now understand the basics - which Chris Stoakes explains so clearly - meaning that reading the business pages is now a much more useful (and enjoyable) pursuit. Accordingly, the concerns I had about entering the legal profession have been eased.

I am now making my way through Stoakes' other title in this series: "All You Need To Know About the City". Thus far it is proving equally accessible and useful.

Really useful book
This is an essential book for anyone hoping to work in business. It has taught me about things such as the stock market, accounting etc that I have never understood before!

An excellent lifeline
As a Law Graduate I'm well aware of the emphasis that Law firms place on candidates being commercially aware.

This was the first book I encountered devoted entirely to the subject of commercial awareness and will probably be the last, as it has sufficiently helped me to understand the area and has pointed me in the right direction of further sources to investigate; such as the Economist and the Financial Times.

The book contains a bibiliography of books that the author recommends and a Jargon Buster which I will no doubt refer to frequently in the future! I was very satisfied with the information and intend on buying the companion book 'All you need to know about the city', in the foreseeable future.